Good article. Unfortunately, privacy and personal security are the biggest threats to the powers that be who would desire to control information. Those powers naturally want to keep their own privacy and identities secret, but they want to know everything about you.
This article goes along very much with another post about Paris Hilton and MySpace privacy woes - social networks are confusing identity with trust and assuming therefore if you know a person's full identity (or think you know it) then they are trustworthy. As cases have shown in the past, identities can be fabricated for the purposes of ill intent and the trust is implicit in that situation even when it should not be granted, thus demonstrating that the false assumption that identity = trust.
Quite frankly I don't know who any of the people on this forum are, but that's not necessary for me to trust your opinions on Linux and any other subject matter that is discussed. Whether I ever learn your identity by meeting you in person or through other means has little bearing on my trusting of what you post.
Governments don't like the idea that people lie - nor do people in general I think. However, governments (as of late particularly) are expressly paranoid about this fact and are requiring more and more often that you strip yourself of your privacy for the "guarantee" of security (the old, "if you have nothing to hide, then you have nothing to worry about.")
Anyway, not trying to make this a conspiracy thread, just saying that I agree 100% with the article and think the everyone (online certainly) should take the time to step back and look at how much personal information they distribute daily online and in the "real world". It's probably far more than anyone needs to know about you in order to trust you.
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Ubuntu 8.10 (64-bit), Ubuntu 7.10 (64-bit)
OpenFiler 2.2 (rPath Linux base), Mythbuntu 8.10
